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What do we inherit, and how, and why? The relatively new field of epigenetics studies the impact of environment and experience on genes themselves. How much had the gene pool of the Waldens—that apparently cheerful extended family I had seen singing on YouTube—formed me? I did not come from the line of small, wiry, dark-eyed people of the shtetl, the men swaying over crumbling tombstones, prayer books in their hands. The imprint of pogroms, of the difficulties and sorrows of immigrant life was not mine—at least not in a physical sense. But I had carried these things a long way in my heart. I was of that dusty and doomed Polish village—and I was not. What had I inherited psychologically? What was in my blood? I was made of three people: my mother, my father, Ben Walden. Disparate worlds had been floating and colliding within me all my life.

To contend with these invisible floating worlds, I had created a narrative edifice, I now understood. Story after story kept me from ever inching too close to the truth. People had told me every single day of my life that I didn’t look like I belonged in my family—nor did I feel I belonged in my family—yet I didn’t stop to consider what this might mean. I couldn’t afford to. Not even after I learned the method of my conception at the age of twenty-five. Not even after Susie told me I ought to look into it.

The clues screamed in neon. But I could not see them. After all, plenty of people feel or look “other” than their parents or siblings. Biology doesn’t promise similarity. Traits skip generations. Characteristics emerge, seemingly out of nowhere. Our parents seem alien to us. My mother, certainly, had always seemed alien to me, biology be damned. And so I built my narrative edifice, brick by brick: my mother was a pathological narcissist who had a borderline personality disorder; my father was depressed, shattered by marital misfortune; I was an Orthodox Jewish girl who looked like she could have gotten bread from the Nazis; I was the hard-won only child of my older parents. My sense of otherness derived from these—and only these—facts.

Ben Walden looked at his own simple typo and saw a Freudian slip, potential meaning. He didn’t have second thoughts but second thoughts about us—he and I. Thoughtus. I had noticed the typo, too, of course, and had smiled at it. It had the kind of psychological nuance I tend to enjoy. The feeling I would have again and again, of recognizing myself in Ben, was one I could become aware of only as I realized I had never experienced it before.

I had not seen myself in my father. Nor had I seen myself reflected back in my mother, no matter that she had given birth to me. Nor had I felt a kinship with Susie, as much as I tried. A friend who had once met Susie later told me she had always known we couldn’t possibly be related. It wasn’t only a physical thing. It was a disjunction of the spirit. We didn’t fit. We didn’t—any of us—belong together.

As the weeks ticked closer toward my meeting with Ben, I wondered if he, too, felt this strange sense of familiarity. How much of my work had he read? My books and essays would have given him a smattering of insights and clues. But I had a powerful instinct about him—the kind that doesn’t come from study. His gentleness, his manner, his way of being, signaled something deeper.

I tried to read as much as I could about what it must have been like to have been him—a medical student, a sperm donor—in the early 1960s. I wanted to put myself in his place. He had walked through the doors of that institute in Philadelphia with its cages of albino rats. He had been there. Quite often, by his own admission. I couldn’t see talking with him about it—and yet I couldn’t see not talking with him about it. I found images of the nine-story Art Deco building on the corner of South Thirty-sixth Street, central to Penn’s campus, which now houses the women’s clothing store Loft. The Farris Institute had been on the sixth floor. I thought of my parents, side by side in the elevator, riding up. And of Ben Walden, stepping into the same elevator, moments later.

The research continued to be bizarre and almost unbearable. I discovered an obituary of Edmond Farris that made no sense—he had died suddenly, of a heart attack, several months before I was conceived. If Farris was dead, then who was running his institute? A man I met on Wendy Kramer’s Donor Sibling Registry told me that Augusta Farris—not a doctor, not a scientist, in fact a cookbook illustrator—had put on a white lab coat and continued her husband’s work after his unexpected death. Did I owe my existence to Augusta Farris? This new information left me reeling. What potent combination of lawlessness, secrecy, desire, shame, greed, and confusion had led to my conception? Would Ben Walden have known anything about the inner workings of Farris, or had he simply slipped through the back door, performed his services, then headed blithely back to Chemistry Lab?

A hardcover book arrived in the mail during that mystifying month of Elul—one I had ordered from a used-book store online months earlier. It was titled simply Artificial Insemination. Its spine cracked when I opened it, emitting the musty scent of old, abandoned paper. The book was nearly as old as I was. Its author, Dr. Wilfred Finegold, had been the head of the Department of Sterility at Planned Parenthood in Pittsburgh. Leafing through chapters like “Artificial Insemination and Animal Husbandry” and “Anticipated Legal Problems,” I turned to one called “The Couple—The Donor.” Finegold offered a list of standards all vigilant sterologists—and presumably a widowed cookbook illustrator in a white lab coat—should follow in order to select donors who would produce the highest-quality semen for their patients:

1. The donor must remain an unknown.

2. The donor should be in fine health mentally and physically.

3. The donor should be of fine physical stock.

4. The donor should be of high fertility.

5. The donor should be of excellent character.

6. The donor must be cooperative.

7. The donor’s characteristics must match those of the patient’s husband.

8. The donors should be men of science or medicine.

9. Multiple donors should be utilized if possible.

The chapter concludes: “It isn’t absurd to presume that a child of artificial insemination has an advantage eugenically, mentally and physically. The donors chosen are devoid of hereditary taints; they have the mental capacity to advance to upper classes in schools of medicine; they are physically able to procreate and they are even free of such irritating conditions as hay fever or allergy.”